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know porcelain was to know the value of his own community. In that respect, Chen’s

connoisseurship was an act of self-construction, even if his nineteenth-century

denigration led to a subsequent erasure of porcelain’s history. Self-constitution implied

self-destruction in this sense. Intellectual historians have located the 1898 to 1911 period

as a decade when reformers and revolutionaries placed utmost importance on education

and intellectual reform, at times privileging the realm of ideas over materialist

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solutions. However, an examination of how porcelain became the center of concern for
community renewal, social change, and aesthetic educators like Chen Liu shows that the

cleavage between material and idea was itself a historical one. Chen chose

connoisseurship as a path of action over collecting in light of historical circumstances

that included material losses: looting, war indemnities, and power struggles.

1
Tao Ya, juan xia, 314: ܝϞᔝऌ٫fጛᛕመ࢕ʘႭfࢸ˸ె❶fႿ׸ՉΤ˛౻ᅃᕄ
ௗ፽f᜗Է฽މጾᔬ. Tao Ya is reprinted in Zhongguo gudai taoci wenxian jilu ʕ਷̚
˾ௗନ˖ᘠ፨፽ [Collection of Ancient Chinese Porcelain documents] (Beijing:
Quanguo tushuguan wenxian suowei fuzhizhongxin, 2003) and in Shuo Tao, eds., Sang
Xingzhi et al., (Shanghai: Shanghai keji jiaoyu chubanshe, 1993). Hereafter, the footnote
citation will follow the format of the handwritten reprinted copy in the anthology
Zhongguo gudai taoci wenxian jilu ʕ਷̚˾ௗନ˖ᘠ፨፽ (2003) as such: Tao Ya, juan
xia or juan shang, (if relevant), page number.

th
2 Chen Liu, Doubei tang ji鬬؎ੀা [Record of Collecting Wine Cups], Guangxu 4
year, 1904. Copy accessed at the rare book collection in the Shanghai Museum Library in
December 2006.

3
Chang Hao, Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1987), Introduction.

4 Joseph Levenson’s articulation is in Confucian China and Its Modern Fate (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1968).

5
Joseph Levenson, Liang Ch’i ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1953).